People from a meeting were being removed multiple times yesterday and had to keep rejoining. what causes this?

Question

Yesterday during a board of directors Microsoft Teams meeting, some attendees kept getting removed during the meeting and kept having to rejoin. They received a message - you have been removed from the meeting, click here to rejoin (or something similar, I don't have the exact wording). This hasn't happened before. What could cause it and how do I fix it so it doesn't happen again? The attendees are from within our domain as well as external users.

Answer 1

Hi @Jeanne Erra, 

Thank you for reaching out and sharing detailed information regarding the behavior when attendees are removed from a Teams meeting. I’m sorry your meeting was disrupted by multiple attendees being removed and prompted to rejoin.  

Since this affected multiple people, including external participants, the best path is to verify external access, tighten meeting roles, check Microsoft 365 service health, and then use Teams Admin Center diagnostics to see what happened across impacted users. 

To do this, please follow these steps: 

1. Verify external access settings 

• Open Microsoft Teams admin center and sign in with an admin account.  
• In the left navigation, select External collaboration.  
• Select External access.  
• Review your organization level external access configuration and confirm the external participants’ domains are allowed.  

 

• Confirm the relevant users are not blocked by a user policy, because external access requires both the org setting and a user policy to allow it.  

2. Restrict presenters   

Presenters can remove other participants. If “Who can present” is left broad, more people can have presenter permissions and unintentionally remove others.  

• Open the meeting in the Teams Calendar.  
• Select the meeting to open its details. 
• Select Meeting options.  
• In Roles, find Who can present.  

 

• Set Who can present to Only organizers and co organizers, or choose Specific people.  
• Select Save. 

3. Check Microsoft 365 service health (rule out a wider Teams incident)  

• Go to the Microsoft 365 admin center and sign in with an admin account.  
• In the left navigation, select Health > Service health.  
• On the Overview tab, locate Microsoft Teams and review any active issues or advisories.  
• If you are experiencing the issue but it is not listed, select Report an issue and submit the short form. 

 

4. Review meeting diagnostics in Teams Admin Center 

• Open Microsoft Teams admin center. 
• In the left navigation, select Users > Manage users.  

 

• Select an affected user.  
• Open the Meetings and calls tab.  
• Locate the meeting under In-progress meetings for real time telemetry or Completed meetings if it is older or no real time data is available.   
• Repeat the same review for the affected users to confirm whether the timeline points to network, device, client, or service patterns. 

5. Contact Microsoft Support 

If the issue continues, this could be related to Teams backend service issue and your current scenario may need to be diagnosed by Microsoft Technical Support Team.  

Microsoft's back-end support team should collect some more advanced log information from the Global Admin through a remote session to diagnose the current scenario. If needed, a front-line technical support engineer can also have a specific support team investigate some specific situations further.  

Due to the limited permissions and access resources of our forum moderators, we are unable to collect certain types of log information in public forums for this reason and for the privacy of our users' data. After diagnosing the situation, our technical support team can provide possible information from their point of view. If there are any known issues, the Technical Support Engineer can provide this information from their back-end resources.   

For the standard procedure information provided above, please contact the IT Admin of your organization to raise an open service request to our online support as an administrator through the Microsoft 365 admin center so that they can diagnose this particular scenario with some more technical resources. 

For your reference: Get support - Microsoft 365 admin | Microsoft Learn (Online support). Also note that you may need to collect and provide log files for troubleshooting.  

 

I hope this information is helpful. Please follow the steps above and let me know if it works for you. If not, we can continue working together to resolve the issue.   

Thank you for your patience and understanding. If you have any questions or need additional assistance, please don’t hesitate to reach out so I can continue to support you. If you found the response useful, please consider marking it as accepted, as this may help other community members who are looking for similar guidance.   

I look forward to continuing the conversation.

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Answer 2

In Microsoft meeting products there are known issues where participants are unexpectedly removed from meetings and must repeatedly rejoin. The exact cause depends on the platform and version in use, but the documented root causes and fixes are:

1. Skype for Business / Lync 2013 client issue ("You have been removed from this conversation")

• Scenario: A meeting is started with Meet Now and no audio is added, and the organizer’s conference policy only allows data sharing, with both AllowNonEnterpriseVoiceUsersToDialOut and AllowAnonymousUsersToDialOut set to False.
• Effect: Participants cannot stay in the meeting and see a message like “You have been removed from this conversation.”
• Fix: Install the June 7, 2016 update KB3115033 for Lync 2013 (Skype for Business). This resolves the removal behavior in that scenario.

2. Skype for Business Server 2015 UCWA applications issue

• Scenario: In a Skype for Business Server 2015 environment, users who join via UCWA-based applications (for example, web or custom apps using the Unified Communications Web API) are unexpectedly removed from meetings.
• Fix: Install the August 2021 cumulative update 6.0.9319.619 for Skype for Business Server 2015 Core Components on the server. This update addresses the issue of UCWA users being dropped from meetings.

3. External/guest access configuration (for Microsoft Teams)

• If the meeting was in Microsoft Teams and only external or guest participants were being removed or blocked from staying connected, misconfigured external access or guest access can cause join/participation problems:
  • Ensure the external participants’ domains are not blocked and are allowed in Teams external access settings.
  • Ensure the external organizations also allow the organizer’s domain.
  • Ensure guest access is turned on if guests are used instead of external federated users.

Practical next steps based on these documented causes:

1. Identify the platform used for the board meeting:
   • If it was Skype for Business / Lync 2013 client-based:
     • Confirm whether meetings were started with Meet Now and without audio.
     • Check the conference policy for the organizer (data-sharing-only, dial-out flags set to False).
     • If this matches, deploy the June 7, 2016 KB3115033 client update to all affected users.
   • If it was Skype for Business Server 2015 with web/UCWA-based join:
     • Confirm whether affected users joined via web or UCWA-based apps.
     • If so, apply the August 2021 cumulative update 6.0.9319.619 to the Skype for Business Server 2015 Core Components.
2. If the meeting was in Microsoft Teams and external users were affected:
   • In Teams admin settings, verify external access domain rules and guest access settings so external participants are allowed to join and stay in meetings.

Applying the relevant updates (for Skype for Business/Lync) or correcting external/guest access configuration (for Teams) is the documented way to prevent this type of repeated removal from happening again.

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References:

• "You have been removed from this conversation" error when you join a meeting created through Meet Now in Lync 2013
• Users are removed from a meeting when using Skype for Business Server 2015 UCWA applications (KB5005517)
• Errors when external participants try to join a Teams meeting